Saturday, November 5, 2005

   Chapter 15: Sky Song (part 3)
The morning started overcast and cool. There was no fog when the Caravan started to kick off from the rocky shore, but the entire world seemed colorless and gray nevertheless.
The two groups traveled in utter silence; Aurora was still sleeping, laying the length of the boat with her head resting on Lucifer’s lap. Tari and Lynley paddled, fighting the current with a new-found strength.
Pen had not rested the night before. The feeling of foreboding had been stronger than ever, and it still spun around impatiently inside him. His attention kept getting drawn to sky, although he did not know the cause; his hand strayed constantly to Lucaya.
They had been traveling for half an hour, and their resting place had just passed out of sight behind them, when Pen sensed the darkness finally drawing quickly nearer. He stopped paddling suddenly, looking fretfully at the two high stone cliffs on either side, who were crowned with trees that jutted out dangerously over the edge.
“Pen, what—?” Ed, who was at the other paddle, started to say.
“Go back!!” roared the voice of Panda to them as Keion shot out over their heads, swerving up into the sky. Lyanni and Nano howered lower over the group, Sasheeta flying on her left and Koshga on her right. “Go back to the shore! Now!!”
Noise erupted as the confused Caravan reorganized itself. But it was all in vain.
“It’s too late,” Pen said to himself, through gritted teeth. He set down the oar inside the boat. Ed gave him a confused look, but no sooner had he dipped his paddle back into the river than a great shadow fell over them. Talking turned into screams of fear and terror.
Pen scowled when he recognized the darkness that had been bothering him. It was a wyvern, huge and brown and powerful. Its feather-covered wings could span the distance between the two cliffs; its tail lashed out like a whip behind it. A long, snaking neck ended in a dragon’s head, but ugly and out of proportion.
The kids had no time to spare on sight-seeing; many of them didn’t even get a glimpse of the monster before it swooped on them. Its long neck easily reached down between the cliffs.
They could only watch as the monster slashed through the group of children; boats broke apart and the river turned red. A horrible song of screaming voices filled the air, undermined by the triumphant bellow of the wyvern.
Sasheeta and Koshga were the first to make a move. As it came towards them, they hurled themselves at its eyes and tore at them with their claws. Blinded, the creature screeched in pain and shook its mighty head, smashing it against the cliffs. The boys flinched as they heard the pseudodragons scream; two specks of red were flung against the cliffs with sickening sounds, and disappeared in the water below.
Nano and Lyanni dodged the blinded creature as it writhed in mid-air, trying to get close to it without getting hit by its flailing wings and tail and claws and head. It shredded the trees at the cliffs’ edges, sending a rain of wood and pine needs upon the river. At the same time, the end of the wyvern’s tail smashed against a loose boulder within the cliff just upstream from them. With a groan, the stone came free, making the ground shake as it crashed into the river.
“Yatii, watch out!” Raine yelled. Fast as lightning, he grabbed the angel around the middle sprang with him into the freezing water, just before the splintered end of a tree trunk smashed into the boat where they had been sitting. Water splashed over everything as the boat broke and capsized, emptying Ed and Pen into the river.
The water was painfully cold, but Pen could not feel it. Anger was burning inside him—anger that he was helpless, anger at the wyvern, and anger that he could not explain. He saw as a huge wave attacked the rest of the Caravan, capsizing the last boats, sent by the boulder that had so conveniently helped the monster achieve its dirty work.
He closed his eyes, feeling the familiar anger curse through his entire being. There was an incredible darkness somewhere… no longer from the wyvern, but from a mind much more familiar…
… The pain was unbearable, but it only gave him strength. He held Aurora in his arms, not even feeling the cold of the water as it ate away at him. His muscles screamed from the burden, his mind roaring with the black anger, but he did not think… he only acted…
Be strong, Lucifer Pen thought to his friend, releasing himself from the darkness. When he opened his eyes, his anger burned inside their depths. He filled himself with its power and emptied his mind of everything else…
Pen sprang out of the water, drawing Lucaya as he flew through the air, and landed nimbly on the fallen boulder. A gust of air from the wyvern’s pounding wings whipped around him, but he did not feel it. He looked to the sky, where Nano was trying use magicked rope to tie the monster together, but to no avail. Even Havoc’s magic was not strong enough against wild-magic in a wyvern. It lashed out blindly with a foot and struck Lyanni to the ground, and her rider went down with her.
Using its hearing, it now came back around for another attack on the Caravan. Pen had been expecting it. As it swooped and brought its head down, he gathered all his strength, and jumped.
For a second, he was flying. Then, his feet connected with the monster’s skull. It roared in anger and shook its head, flying back out from the cliffs and up, away from the river. Pen held on to its rough scales with one hand, refusing to let go, and drove Lucaya into the soft part of its neck, just below the jaw.
The wyvern kept flying, raining blood beneath it, until it became too weak to ascend. It collided roughly with a steep side of a mountain. Pen drew out his sword and sprang off, just before it hit the ground and shaved down the trees in its path, skidding slowly to a stop.
He took a moment to ensure that the wyvern was truly dead. When it did not move again, he wiped Lucaya off on his already-bloody pants and sheathed her.
Looking around him, Pen was faced with a new problem. The monster had carried him far from the river, around an entire mountain. Not far above him, the pine trees began to fade into the white of snow; below, the green valley stretched, silent and sleeping beneath the gray sky.
He was not too concerned about getting back to the Caravan; he knew that he could run there within the day. But with the blood in the water, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to return. Buffeted by a cold wind, Pen curled up against a tree, feeling strangely empty inside. He felt helpless; though he had defeated the wyvern, there was not a speck of triumph inside him. In his mind’s eye, he kept replaying the screams of the kids as they were slaughtered.
Before he knew it, before he could stop it, his eyes began to stream with black tears. He took his hands away from his face and stared at them in wonder as the darkness flowed over them. Then, he closed his eyes and cried to the sky, his voice echoing on and on over the mountains like the song of something forgotten.
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